Energy Efficiency Analysis of p-Persistent CSMA and the Effect of Sleeping Periods in a Distributed Sensor Topology

A typical wireless sensor network (WSN) operates under the harsh constraints of limited power resources, which poses challenging problems in its network design process. As a result, the energy consumption characteristics of the WSN need to be precisely studied across different layers of the communication protocol stack. In this paper, we present a thorough investigation on the energy consumption of p-persistent carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) based medium access control (MAC) layer in a distributed single hop WSN setting. Specifically, we develop an analytical framework to evaluate the energy efficiency of p-persistent CSMA for non-saturated conditions, suggesting parameters that can maximize the efficiency. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of the addition of sleeping periods by examining the resultant interplay between a sensor node´s lifetime extension and the amount of information it can successfully exchange.